As a long time reader of The New York Review of Books: 1971 to the present: Mr. Remnick was part of a ‘Left Coterie’ that included Robert Silvers, the editor of NYRB. Silvers idolized Kennan , he appeared often, and NYRB sold his books through ‘The Readers Subscription Service’.
So it cannot escape the attention of a reader that Silvers provided publication space to New Cold Warrior Timothy Snyder, as early as 2014:
The Haze of Propaganda Timothy Snyder
From Moscow to London to New York, the Ukrainian revolution has been seen through a haze of propaganda.
FORUM: George F. Kennan and the Cold War: Perspectives on John Gaddis’s Biography
Editor’s Introduction Mark Kramer
Gaddis, Kennan, and the Cold War: An Assessment of the Biography David Mayers
Analyzing and Assessing Gaddis’s Kennan Biography: Questionable Interpretations and Unpursued Evidence and Issues Barton J. Bernstein
Gaddis’s Achievement: Taking the Measure of Kennan Vladimir O. Pechatnov
An Assessment of John Lewis Gaddis’s George F. Kennan: An American Life Ivan Kurilla
Contained? The Religious Life of George F. Kennan and Its Influence James C. Wallace
Commentary on John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life Binoy Kampmark
George F. Kennan and the Division of Europe Vít Smetana
Gaddis’s Kennan: A Different Kennan? Anders Stephanson
Reply to the Commentaries of John Lewis Gaddis
This is too important an issue, to let the Neo-Con/Neo-Liberal alliance, now self-presenting as American Political Centrism , attempt to Control The Narrative- David Remnick seeks to discredit Kennedy, as a part of a political toxin of The Left, a Putin Apologist, or in the parlance of the McCarthyites, a Putin fellow traveler, via his notion of ‘The Alternative Facts of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’ . Mr. Remnick lives in a fools paradise, that doesn’t think that a potential Reader, might explore other alternative sources of information? or that that reader might be suspicious of Mr. Remnick’s political agenda, in his badgering, bulling tone that he adopts to his guest? That now has become the political weapon of choice of the Neo-Con/Neo-Liberal alliance. Also Mr. Remnick lacks the political savvy, to even conceive, that a Reader might look to the toxic object lesson of Jeremy Corbyn, that stares us in the face?
Last thought : Kennan was a thinker/ writer who traded upon his past, in the political present: The Reader catches some sobering glimpses of him in ‘The Georgetown Set’ .
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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